Page 115 of The Madness Within

Until there was no veil. No watchers. No war.

Only us. Tangled in magic. Marked by madness. Bound by love.

Hours passed. Or days.

We lay tangled, my arm beneath her, my other hand brushing the sweat matted hair from her cheek.

“I love you.” I said first. Not because she needed to hear it, because I needed to say it. To brand her with truth. “I love you like madness loves silence. Like death loves the last breath.”

She blinked up at me, lips swollen, voice hoarse. “I love you too… Dorian Vale. Even when you’re a possessive bastard.”

“Especially then,” I grinned.

And when she fell asleep, naked and glowing beside me, I watched her like the monster I am, because nothing in heaven or hell would take her from me now.

Not fate. Not gods. Not death.

My Little Thief. My wife. My end and my beginning.

Chapter Fifty-One

??A Hallow Warning

Ember

A week after the honeymoon, Dorian was already back to work.

Dorian took the case without hesitation, and in just twelve days, he dismantled every charge, manipulating the legal system so flawlessly it was almost art.

They said it was just a child. Eight years old. Wide eyed. Fragile. Asa. That was the name the courts gave him.

But names were just masks.

He screamed at shadows, clawed at orderlies, spoke in a dialect dead for centuries. They labeled it trauma. Psychosis. Imagination.

But when he looked at me, when his ink-slick eyes met mine, it wasn’t fear I saw. It was recognition. Like he knew exactly what I was. Like we’d met before, long before I was born.

This wasn’t a boy.

It was a beast sewn into soft flesh. Three heads. One body.

Thirty-seven witches and warlocks left in his wake, ripped apart for the magic pulsing in their veins. He fed on power. Devoured it. Drank it down like divine nectar and came back thirstier each time.

Now the courts, so proud in their blind mercy, had assigned him to a private facility, a “paranormal psychiatric institution for gifted youth.” A cage with satin bars.

Pathetic.

Dorian read the sentencing once. Then he closed the file and smiled, slow and lethal.

“Justice doesn’t negotiate,” he said. “It eradicates.”

And we would. Together.

We wouldn’t wait for him to kill again.

We’d intercept the transport.

And bury what should’ve never been born.

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